For more than a hundred years the Groves have been one of the first families of Nashville. Bezellia Grove, named for a famous ancestor, feels the pressure to live up to her mother’s expectations that she speak French fluently, learn to ballroom dance and behave like a proper lady.

But even prominent families have secrets, and the Groves do their best to hide Bezellia’s mother’s alcoholism and her father’s near estrangement. The family nanny, Maizelle, and the handyman, Nathaniel, do more to raise Bezellia and her sister than her parents do. As Bezellia grows up, she has to decide the kind of person she wants to become.

Set against the backdrop of Nashville during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove by Susan Gregg Gilmore touches on issues of race, class, alcoholism, religion and love. Bezellia’s life, even though she has physical luxuries, is far from easy. And in making difficult choices through the years, she defines the kind of person she is and sets herself apart from her parents.

While this book is aimed at adults, girls aged 16 and up would enjoy reading it as well.

Yesterday Catherine and I went to see The Secret Life of Bees with her book club. It was a school holiday and Madeleine joined us, since we had previously read the book with her book club too. We enjoyed the movie, and there were quite a few tears flowing during the show. We also had an interesting discussion comparing the movie and the book over ice cream afterward.

First I have to say we all liked the book hands-down better than the movie. The book is beautifully written, and it brings up issues of racism, familial love and acceptance of people for who they are. It’s not tidy, and by the end you know that the characters will go on trying to make sense of the times they live in and their reaction to them as well as to personal events in their own lives. There was lots of information about bee life that tied in as a wonderful metaphor to what the characters were experiencing.

While we liked the movie, we were very aware of things they changed from the book that made it flawed for us. For one thing, the movie seemed to add the bees as an afterthought, which seems strange. There were lots of scenes with August and Lily in bee clothing, but most of the bee talk seemed more informational about keeping bees and not metaphorical. Three other major differences between the book and the movie made up the bulk of our complaints about how the movie could have been better.

In the movie Zach ends up beaten up by white men for sneaking Lily, a white girl, into the colored section of a movie theater. This placed the blame on Lily and Zach for what came next. In the book, I was worried that something like that would happen because the two were so close, and I was glad when it didn’t. We all  thought it was much better for the story for Zach to end up in jail, suspected of assaulting a white man even though he had done nothing. It showed how people tend to see faces different than their own as all looking the same, hence stripping the identity from an ethnic group. If you can get in trouble because all black people look alike to white people, then your individual actions cannot be counted on to set you apart.

Also, in the movie, Our Lady of Chains loses part of her story, and part of her significance. In the book, she is depicted as being a carved ship’s masthead that probably started out as a representation of a white woman, but through her trials and tribulations the color of her wood turned black. One of the girls mentioned she was a great symbol to show that we are all the same inside, regardless of the color of our skin, and she’s a bridge to heal racial issues. In the movie, she was depicted as being originally carved as a black woman, so the symbolism is lost.

The ending of the book was also much more satisfying than the ending of the movie, although we all got the feeling it was intended to be just the opposite. I won’t detail the endings except to say that in the book it’s not tidy, which is more like real life and more satisfying somehow. The movie wraps it all up in a nice tidy package that trivializes what’s come before. It felt trite to many of us.

Regardless of noticing things we liked or disliked about the movie and the book, we all thought it was a great discussion for our mother-daughter book club.

This past Sunday Catherine and I went to our mother-daughter book club meeting to talk about The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Ellen cooked a great southern-themed dinner to go with the book; we feasted on ham, biscuits, corn fritters and green beans. Of course there was honey. It’s hard to read this book and not start to crave honey on the comb. As a southern-born-and-raised girl I was as happy as could be.

When the book was chosen, I was a little worried that I would be bored reading it. I had already read it twice: first in a women’s book club I used to belong to and the second time with Madeleine for her mother-daughter book club. But I need not have worried.

I started to read the first page to Catherine and was instantly reminded of how much I love the book, and how much I admire the way Sue Monk Kidd writes. The characters are well developed and their emotions leap off the page as real, not just words written about what they are feeling. I ache for Lily in so much of the book, and it’s easy to see that her need to have a mother who loves her influences everything she does.

We all talked about a favorite character, and it was interesting to note that nearly every character in the book is developed well enough to have a following. Some of us thought that August was too perfect, and that the pink house was too much of a eutopia. But we also recognized that the issues dealt with were very complicated, and the story needed August’s wise voice to sort through them.

Racial tension and the civil rights movement was also a large issue underlying the story. It’s interesting how relevant that issue is today in light of the presidential campaign and election. When I shared some of my stories about growing up in the south during those racially turbulent times, the girls looked on as though I was talking about a foreign country. In many ways, that era does seem foreign, and Obama’s election is testament to how far we’ve come since then.

We plan to see the movie as a group next week. We’re looking forward to talking afterward about how the two compare. I highly recommend The Secret Life of Bees for mother-daughter book clubs with girls in high school.